A Lazy Gardener’s Best Friends
By Bill Primavera
The Home Guru
As Published in The Examiner, The Putnam Examiner and The Yorktown Examiner
When I first moved to upper Westchester and had a decent property to cultivate, I studied, planned and planted a garden meant to quell the frustration of having lived with only window boxes in the city. By the first mid-summer, my garden was filled with lovely annuals in beds that graduated in height and were arranged with precision according to blooming time and color. I even planted beds of vegetables and progressive waves of lettuce. It was all beautiful.
But after a few years, the occupational therapy of artistic expression with various plants was started to wear thin. It all hit me when a neighbor came by to view my gardens which had become legendary on my block, and he offended me a bit by asking, “who has time for all this? Do you have a gardener?” I felt almost guilty that I had the time on my hands to do it.
As I got older, I enjoyed an up tick in business while my back and knees were definitely cutting way back on painless serviceability. Slowly but surely I began planning a new garden around one basic rule: low maintenance, tending to it year by year as an investment in my future time management. The grass upkeep had never been a problem. Because I live in an 18th century home, I didn’t want a lawn that looked chemically enhanced, so I don’t fertilize it at all. I want it to look as though sheep tend to it. I accept both crabgrass and dandelions (the greens are great in salads), and I have a lawn service take care of the mowing.
Other than grass, my principal friends in this lazy gardener’s endeavor now are: ground covers, perennial plants, bulbs, flowering shrubs and mulch, lots of mulch. Some gardening books would say that ground covers are best to discourage weeds and prevent soil erosion, but I use it to help define space among stretches of lawn.
Two of the most stalwart ground covers were already on the property, but just in a couple of clumps in odd places. They are pachysandra with its dense and healthy foliage, and periwinkle with its dark green waxy leaves and lovely violet-blue flowers that perform for weeks in spring.
Both of these spread like crazy, especially the pachysandra, if helped along by pulling on the lower white shoots horizontally, then covering them again with earth in its expanded location. I utilized the pachysandra under my biggest maple trees where it was difficult to grow grass. Within a few years, as much as 20 percent of my 1-1/2 acres was covered profusely with the plant. The periwinkle was used around azalea since it blooms at the same time, more or less.
While spreading the ground covers, I began planting bulbs, lots of them, mostly tulips and daffodils. Perennials followed with black-eyed susans and phlox in various colors. And, in some beds, I planted varieties of iris and peonies, alternating the clumps which also bloom at the same time, lasting year after year.
Only recently did I invest in perennial geraniums and they have filled my summer quest for color with great joy and little care. Mine come in a bright blue and the foliage becomes more widespread and dense each year.
Another good friend of my lazy plan are daylilies, which keep spreading and thickening so that nothing can penetrate them (and the lilies themselves also taste great in salads and add vibrant color too. Have you ever tried that?). The garden books would advise us to thin out daylilies, but I never have the time, and they don’t seem to suffer for it.
I also love hostas, of which there are dozens of varieties. Mine feature blue spikes and a variety with fragrant white spikes, filled with big blossoms. (Note how I’m too lazy to even learn the latin names). I use them in unusual ways that I don’t see in other gardens, such as planting the white-blossoming variety in and among the white azaleas. They seem to love growing together and create a lush, almost tropical carpet of dense foliage all summer long. When the azaleas stop blooming, the hostas start. I rim the azaleas and hostas with daylilies and it forms a nice graduated and natural mound of green with blossoms progressing from the azaleas to the daylilies to the hostas which last until late summer.
In August, I love the easy and colorful blooms of Rose of Sharon, kept lower to the ground than its natural tendency to grow as high as 15 feet or so, and darting in and out of other plantings.
A main objective of gardeners is to control weeds effortlessly and the best way to do this is with mulch, thick enough to control weeds and retain water, but not too thick for the water to reach the earth. And did you know that some mulch can come treated to prevent weeds? Now, that’s really helping a lazy gardener along!
There’s just one caution about a lazy gardener’s planting scheme: deer love hostas more than any other plant, and they’re rather fond of perennial geraniums too. While they’ll generally stay away from the ground covers, guard your hostas with a monthly spray of Bobbex. It will smell terrible for a day, but it will also upset the deer’s sense of smell long after that.
There are only two annuals in the “lazy” category which I plant to supplement the perennials: geranium which are all but indestructible and will tolerate it when you forget to water them for a couple of weeks, and impatiens which provide color all summer long in my window boxes and urns. Planting these two serviceable friends take only an hour or two and give color all summer long, right into the fall.
As I see it, gardens should go through passages just as life itself, and I’m definitely into my easy-does-it, big effect-little work phase. I do admire my garden, but today I can say, bring on the juleps.
Bill Primavera is a Westchester, NY-based realtor ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and marketing practitioner ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) who can be reached for questions or comment directly at 914-522-2076.
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